darkforcesmushfandomcom-20200213-history
Warfrost
Personality Warfrost is not an easy person to get along with, especially if those trying to get close to her are human. She's trying though, she really is. It's obvious this isn't just another mindless Red Talon. She is open, willing to learn, and there always seems to be gears turning behind this lupus' blue eyes. She's not the friendliest Garou though. Not openly mean, she does tend to shy away from socialization and touch, and is often even uncomfortable indoors. In lupus, she doesn't tolerate things that are usually reserved for dogs: petting, being talked down to, etc. She isn't past play when she is in a good mood, or attempts to converse. She doesn't try to stifle her laughter when she finds something truly funny, but the concept of faking laughter (or rather, anything) is beyond her ability to comprehend what others would consider to be common courtesy. Speaking English is difficult for the lupus, obviously, as she doesn't do it often. She is in homid perhaps more often than one would expect, and although uncomfortable in this form, she seems to be getting used to it. She's rather normal-looking for a lupus, and might easily pass for homid if she doesn't try to put together a sentence. Sheet Freebies used: 45/45 Abilities Talents * Skills * Knowledges * Merits And Flaws Merits * Flaws History Pre-Change Warfrost grew up as most lupus do, born into a strong, healthy wolf family in central Canada, into a litter of three other kin pups. From the beginning, she was looked over, as were all in her family, by the neighboring Red Talon pack. They were called the Shadowchasers, these Talons, and specialized in hunting those rich prize-hunting humans who would swoop in on helicopters to mow down their prey with guns. When they would descend to claim their prize (Which was more often than not one of the Talons, posing as a wolf to take a few bullets and go down), the Shadowchasers would strike. In this way, they have gathered many trophies, and have buried many pieces of wrecked helicopter. Cubhood From the moment her kinfetch went off, and she was caught firsting during her hunt, she had become under the tutelage of her father, the Alpha of the Red Talon pack. Sleeps-with-Eyes-Open taught her everything she needed to know to be a Garou, as well as a good Red Talon. He trained her in the evils humanity, their blight upon the world. He taught her to hunt them, children at first, taking her on long, long treks through the wilderness to far-off logging camps, showing her how to shift and lure the children to come and play before dispatching the next generation of loggers before they become a threat. Several other cliath admired her. Others may have been jealous. Black-Mane was one of them, the young ahroun constantly jostling his way to better himself in the view of Eyes-Open, hoping one day to be named Alpha in the Elder's stead. If anything, Warfrost enjoyed her cubhood. She reveled in the praise of her father, the ease in which she learned how best to serve the Tribe, the pack, and Gaia. As a cub, she was named Snow-Dancer for her affinity for the white flakes she looked forward to every year. She worked, and she fought, and she trained, and soon even Eyes-Open was impressed with her adaptability. Rite of Passage Her Rite of Passage was granted her only five months after her Firsting, much to the chagrin of Black-Mane. Charged with what she had to do, Snow-Dancer sought out one of the logging camps that her father hadn't shown her. One farther than the others. Now used to shifting, she sought her prey: a young man, heading back to his cabin after using the outhouse. She pulled the trick she'd used tens of times before. She melted out of the night in homid, a young girl, naked, perhaps lost. Crying. It worked like a charm. Alarmed, the man ran for her, followed her deep into the woods, calling. He made it almost easy. That's when she shifted back down to her birthform, driving him through the night, fighting him, harrying him, tearing at him while he fought back tooth and nail and knife, tearing at her flesh with it. She bore several scarring wounds from him before he was brought before her Alpha and dispatched, earning her her first Rank, and her first true title, Calls-Man-to-their-Death. Deathcall would repeat her tactic several more times before the camps would become wary of it, speaking of the pale girl who would visit the outskirts of their camps, crying, calling for help. None would follow her now. At the age of two, she attempted to have cubs. Upon first going into heat, Deathcall knew exactly which of the kinfolk she wanted. He was a strong, grey wolf, the biggest and the wisest. Excited, Deathcall let the grey court her, but directly before they could mate, Deathcall shifted to homid. By accident. Put off, the grey would leave her. Deathcall tried several more times, and each time she'd call upon him and become aroused, the excitement would throw her right back down to homid.Dejected, Deathcall gave up, resolving to try again some other time. Revenge One fateful morning, Deathcall would visit her mother and siblings in lupus. She often visited them after her Rite, to see how her siblings had grown, to meet the new generation. They knew her, and welcomed her. On that frosty, dead-cold morning, however, there was no one to greet her. Only blood. Blood of her mother, her siblings, but there was nothing of them. There was also another scent: Man. For the first time in her short life, Deathcall felt the unfamiliar fire of a need for revenge. Burning with this strange emotion, Deathcall summoned forth her father to track down the hunting party that had slaughtered her family. She declared war upon them, and with the early morning's frost on their breath and beneath their paws, they hunted. Their prey was soon found, a lone hunter. Confident in their superiority, the Red Talons descended upon him. Little do they know that this particular hunter was from one of the camps Deathcall had harried in her youth. He was the only one suspicious enough to think (correctly) that it was indeed the work of something supernatural, and had set out to prove it. Thinking he would eventually find the shapeshifting culprits and return a hero, he had been methodically slaughtering every wolf's den he'd come across. With silver. The first blast from a shotgun took Eyes-Open down in a single blow. He never had a chance to heal from the silver. Sparking the second frenzy of her life, Deathcall watched her father fall while silver bullets whizzed by her head. After that, there was nothing. Only the decimated bodies of her father and his killer. Grief also being a new emotion to Deathcall, she did something she'd never think to attempt. She ate the human. Fostern Challenge Dragging home the limp body of her father, Deathcall would once more slip back into her wolf-thinking. There was no longer the need for grief, for revenge. There would be much more killing, as there had been before. Her father would be proud of her. But there was something that had to be done. Returning to her pack less than a hero, she once more fell into her duty of helping to both defend the kinfolk pack and take down the hunters, this time with a renewed vigor. She challenged Black-Mane, who had become a fostern, for the rank. The ahroun, finally confronted with a chance to make himself better than Deathcall in the eyes of his peers, gave her her challenge. Seek out the camp the man who had killed her father had come from and exterminate it. But, the Philodox would have to choose who to bring with her on the hunt. Deathcall took the challenge without hesitation choosing Black-Mane himself. When asked why, Deathcall pointed out the Ahroun's constant need to better her in all things... and she planned to kill many humans. That would mean, if he were to look superior, he'd have to kill many more than she. Between the two of them, she said, the small camp could easily be wiped. At dawn, they struck out, and the Galliards of the pack still talk of the look in Deathcall's eyes that morning. From then on, she was known as Wages-War-with-the-Coming-Frost. And war it was. The Red Talons moved through the camp like ghosts in the pale light, slaughtering, burning, destroying everything in their path. The hunter who'd killed Eyes-Open was not the only one with silver. In fact, there were several. Someone had perhaps tipped them off, and they were ready, waiting, with their glittering buckshot. Within an hour, all that was left was the burning, sizzling remains of the small logging camp. The mill was ablaze, the people, slaughtered. Warfrost, in her fury, and rent one of the men with the silver into pieces, but not before he had managed to squeeze a shot off. Warfrost had lain there, dying, with Black-Mane looking over her with a sort of respectful contempt. He congratulated her, saying she had made Fostern. Had completed her task. And she would die with that new rank. Both Talons knew the truth of this, so when Black-Man, now Alpha, led away the others, Warfrost shifted to her birth form, preparing herself to leave this world. She could not get comfortable, among the blaze and slaughter of her most recent battle. She deserved to die comfortably, or at least not in some disgusting heap of filth that was a human camp. She hauled herself to her feet and set off. She walked in a daze, bleeding from buckshot she couldn't heal. She didn't know how far she went before she collapsed. Abduction She remembered waking up though. Remembered the pain in her chest. Remembered the soft cushion beneath her and the strange smell of controlled fire and cooking meat. She was held down.... no. Bound. Bandages. The strange ache of silver in her chest was gone. But Gaia, the pain. She remembered his face now and again. The /human/ face. She'd not seen a human face, up close, since her Rite. And this was different, much different. There was no fear in his dark eyes when he looked at her, or spoke in that strange language of his. Why was he speaking to her? Didn't he know what she was? She would kill him... before she died. But it would be later, she felt so tired. For weeks it went as such. Warfrost would heal slowly, barely able to breathe let alone stand, or fight, and so she kept up the appearance of what she finally seemed to realize he saw: an injured animal he could perhaps train into slavery. She waited for her moment, biding her time, but, strangely, that moment never came. She was boggled by the way he treated her. He would leave for hours during the day, but he would always come home with prey and to cover her with a blanket. He would feed her ground, raw meat mixed with milk and strange spices. He would change her bandages. Sometimes he'd sing her songs in that strange language that wasn't even English, of which she knew a few words. Eventually, she began to look forward to those songs. She would kill him soon, she might as well enjoy what she could of his presence until she was strong enough to dispatch him. One night, the man stopped singing, and looked at her. Just stared for a moment, while she stared back. "I know what you are," he told her, in English, and he dumped the contents of a small pouch into his hand. It was the silver he'd taken from her chest and lungs. "We are family." Yes. Kin. But still human. She snarled at him contemptuously. He went back to singing. Every night after that, he would stop his singing, and say those words again. Over and over, asking her to speak to him. He would remind her with the bullets what he had done, that he had saved her life. Every night, she would refuse, threatening to bite, /wanting/ to bite. Every night, her resolve lessened. The ache in her chest seemed to flare every time she snarled at his kind eyes. One night, when he returned from the outdoors, she sat on her cushion, waiting, arms wrapped about her knees. She cried into them. That was the day she'd come to realize that she could never kill this human, despite her disillusions. Her father's teachings were wrong. Not all of them were disgusting. /Or/ evil. She was already dead. If he deigned to kill her as she was taught he would, then it would be no further loss to the world. And so she'd waited, in homid, to meet what she perceived to be the end. She hadn't expected his exhilaration. His warm greeting as if she were a friend long missing, finally come to call. The clothing he brought her to wear (they were his, a bit too big). She didn't understand them. He said they would keep her warm while she had dinner with him. And so the lupus Red Talon ate dinner with the homid kinfolk, dressed in his clothes, being shown what a fork was and how to use it. How silly, forks. Rebirth Warfrost stayed at the man's cabin for several days while she healed. It could have been weeks. She didn't count how long. Diego (that was the weird sound he made when he pointed at himself), told her many stories. Some of them made her laugh. She'd never laughed before. It was strange. Many things were strange. She was most comfortable in lupus, but found herself meeting him in homid more often than not, looking forward to listening to his voice, learning more English words, attempting speech herself. She would return to lupus when he laid upon his bed and slept across from their large room. Everything was so strange, strange and fun, and for the first time in a long time, Warfrost began to feel like Snow-Dancer. She knew when she had to leave. The ache deep in her chest that throbbed when her heart beat had lessened enough to know it wasn't going to get any better. Damage had been done, deep inside of her, that time would not heal. And so she left. The warmth and comfort she felt in Diego's presence and his cabin faded behind her as she struck out on her own. Strangely, that's when she began to feel a different ache, this one not so much a result of her wounds. Rejection She arrived like a ghost among her old pack. Black-Mane had been ousted while she was gone, no longer Alpha, once the sept had discovered he had left Warfrost to die on her Fostern challenge, alone. The ahroun was /not/ happy to see Warfrost, and upon her return demanded, in front of the pack, where she had been. Truthfully, Warfrost told of her difficulty healing, and that a wandering Strider had helped her close her wounds. She didn't realize that Black-Mane had been sent after her to bring her home not long after he'd been demoted, as punishment, and had followed her scent to Diego's cabin. Black-Mane knew her secret, and was determined to have it brought before the pack without delay. He called for Truth of Gaia to be performed. When it was, Deathcall could not lie about having been cared for by a human. About not killing him. Nor could she lie about how strongly she felt that it would have been wrong. More wrong than anything she'd ever felt in her life. It was perhaps this last admittance that saved her life, but she could not escape her punishment. Not unlike the man she'd killed for her Rite of Passage, Warfrost's wolf was taken from her and she was harried, naked and homid, through the cold, bitten and rejected until she reached the edge of the Red Talon's territory. There she was told to never return or to call herself a Red Talon again, given back her wolf, and left to fend for herself. Ronin By the time she reached Diego's cabin, something inside of her had gone wrong. Very wrong. Running caused her to cough blood onto the white snow. She felt that painful ache like no other near her heart, like an icy shard pressing into her core. She was barely conscious when he came to the sound of her calling his name, and she remembered several moments when he looked at her in a way that made her think she was going to die again. Except this time, she didn't want to die. The next day, she was herself once more. The ache was almost familiar to her now. Strange and frightening, but familiar. Diego was worried. He spoke to her, long long sentences that weren't stories. She had trouble understanding. They were leaving, he said... to go somewhere? Somewhere that would take the ache from her chest. Crystal Springs, he kept saying. America. He was taking her away from the forest, the Talons, the camps. He said he would show her how to become something else, something better. And something else. She couldn't understand it. They would talk on the way, he'd said, showing her his car, how it worked, how it would take them to get her fixed. She would pretend she was his wife. It'd be easier? She didn't understand. She would learn. Friends and Acquaintances Diego Del Toro (NPC) - Not much is known about Diego Del Toro. Originally from Madrid, Spain, he had come to America many years ago. He did not live in Canada, but rather merely owned a cabin, something he'd purchased when he discovered how much he truly loved to fish. Ice-fishing, in particular. What a strange hobby for a Spaniard to acquire. Etc Category:Character Archive